We had a rare mid-week hiking treat this week! Well, maybe it was a treat. Depends on who you talk to, I guess. Anyway, one of the things I bid on every year at the Friends of the Smokies Evergreen Ball auction is a hike with our friend Kevin FitzGerald, who is a retired Deputy Superintendent of the Park, followed by the awesome lunch picnic at The Swag. We're lucky in that Kevin will hike with us for free, so I'm really bidding on the lunch experience, and also a particular event that will make me coordinate a hike with Kevin (because we always say, "Let's do this again soon" and then life gets in the way and we don't get around to it for several months).
The lunch package was for five people, so Ben and I planned on meeting Kevin at the Caldwell Fork trailhead and hiking up, and Mom and Pat planned to drive up to The Swag and meet us for lunch. Kevin coaches a high school cross-country team (among other things) and had a practice scheduled for that afternoon, so he wouldn't have time to hike back down with me. Ben didn't want to hike back down with me because the distance from the trailhead to The Swag was enough for him. I wanted to knock out another section of trail, though, so I planned for Mom and Pat to take Kevin back to his car and then give Ben a ride home, while I'd hike back to our car and come home later. I mentioned to Mom and Pat a couple of days beforehand that my hike back down was 5-6 miles, almost all downhill, and told them they were welcome to join me if they were up for it. They thought that sounded like fun, so the plan morphed into Ben and Kevin taking Mom's car after lunch and me, Mom, and Pat hiking back to my car at the trailhead.
We met Kevin at the trailhead just before 7AM and headed out. We hiked Caldwell Fork to its first junction with the Boogerman trail and then took the Boogerman loop, which is kind of like a "bypass" of a couple of miles of the Caldwell Fork trail and re-connects with the Caldwell Fork trail after 3.9 miles (the Caldwell Fork trail covers 1.9 miles between the two ends of Boogerman, so Boogerman is basically a 2-mile detour). My plan for my return trip was to go straight through Caldwell Fork without taking the Boogerman "detour" so I could knock out that 1.9-mile section of Caldwell Fork that I missed on the trip up.
I had heard that the "Boogerman Loop" had all kinds of crazy unbridged water crossings, so I wanted to do that one in the morning so Mom and Pat wouldn't have to cross all the water in the afternoon. Also, because that adds 2 miles to the trip, I thought it would be better for the two of them to have the shorter hike in the afternoon, since they are not frequent hikers and prefer hikes of 5 miles or less.
What I learned when we got to the trailhead is that, when people say there are water crossings on the "Boogerman Loop," they don't mean the Boogerman trail. They mean the portion of the Caldwell Fork trail that you take to complete the loop (i.e., the 1.9-mile portion that I had saved for the afternoon return hike). Huh. I'll worry about that later.
There is some really cool stuff to see on the Boogerman trail, including a bunch of huge trees.
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| Ben's an aspiring tree-hugger, but this one is out of his league. Look at the roots on that thing! |
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| Split trunk with each branch at least 6 feet in diameter |
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| Holy cow! This one's big enough for people to fit inside! |
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See?
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| "Hurry and take the picture; this is creeping me out!" I had to stick my head in and say, "Hello??" before I'd walk in. Who knows what could be living in there. |
There were also some really cool old stone walls. The most impressive was over 100 yards long and 2 feet wide.
After Boogerman ran back into Caldwell Fork, we went a little further up Caldwell Fork until we reached the McKee Branch trail, where we turned to head up the mountain. The McKee Branch trail is pretty rough. It gains about 1,700 feet of elevation in 2.3 miles, and it's rutted and rocky due to heavy horse use and also just from water running down the side of the steep mountain. It's not an easy trail in either direction. But there were some cool mushrooms and berries to distract us.
When we finally made it to the top, we were about 15 minutes late for lunch. There was plenty of food, though, and we gorged ourselves, including sampling just about everything from the massive dessert table. Safe to say it's the best lunch I'll ever have in the middle of a hike (the last time we did this, we ended our hike at The Swag, so it wasn't technically "in the middle" of the hike). The views from Gooseberry Knob are amazing, and the weather was just about perfect.
While we were eating, I had Ben give Mom and Pat an honest assessment of the trail down so they could decide whether they wanted to come with me or whether they wanted to bail and just ride home with Ben and Kevin. Apparently he didn't make it sound bad enough, because they chose to come with me. Honestly, I think my Mom is just always scared that I'm going to die hiking alone, so she was hell-bent on coming with me either way. I guess Pat loves me a lot, too; otherwise, I don't know why she didn't turn and run when she had the chance. 😆
As I mentioned earlier, McKee Branch is a tough trail in either direction. I think the downhill is harder than the uphill, and I think Pat would agree with that assessment. One of her legs was not behaving on the downhill and kept feeling like it was going to collapse on her, so we'd walk a bit and stop to rest until the leg felt better. Our rest stops gave us a chance to look around and see things we probably would've missed if we had just kept walking, because the trail is so rutted and rocky, if you weren't looking at your feet, you were probably going to trip over something. At one stop, Mom spotted this Indian Pipe, which I didn't see on our way up and probably would've missed on the way down as well.
Indian Pipe is so weird because it has no chlorophyll and feeds off of decaying leaves, etc. It looks like a little ghost plant. Anyway, with all of our sightseeing, it took us about 4 hours to hike down the 2.3 miles of McKee Branch, and I was starting to get worried that we wouldn't make it to the car before dark. I used my Garmin to message Ben and tell him we were having some trouble and were going to be late, and he also had my tracking info so he could watch our progress along the trails. I was thinking of exit strategies that involved (1) having someone bring in a horse; or (2) having Ben bring in overnight gear so we could just try again the next day. There are no other, shorter trails in this area that would've been easier "outs."
Luckily, though, once we got down to the Caldwell Fork trail on a much more gentle grade and not so much a steep, rocky ditch, Pat's leg was doing much better. As it turned out, the downhill grade was the biggest problem. So we started to make decent time, even though we had to stop several times (I think 9 times, to be exact) for Mom and Pat to remove their shoes for water crossings. There were 12 crossings total, but three were bridged. I had my "snow gaiters," which are Gore-tex and come up to my knees, and my plan was to do the crossings in my Hokas using the gaiters to shed water; however, the first crossing was so deep that the water would've been over the tops of my gaiters, so I took them off and put on my water shoes (which I brought as a back-up plan) instead. Due to the frequency of the crossings, I just hiked the rest of the trail in my water shoes. The sides of my feet were a little raw afterwards, but it wasn't too bad.
Mom and Pat did not have water shoes (mainly because I had told them we were knocking out all the water crossings on our morning hike - oops), so between the removal of shoes, picking across a stream barefoot, and the drying of feet and re-shoeing on the other side, each crossing took 10-15 minutes. The fact that we did the remaining 3.2 miles of the trail in 3 hours (coming off trail about a half hour before it would get dark in the woods) actually was somewhat of a miracle. An even bigger miracle is that NONE OF US ENDED UP FALLING IN THE WATER. Really, I was amazed by that. I am not a graceful person, but the fact that I had water shoes and my trekking poles made the crossings relatively easy for me. Mom and Pat were doing the crossings barefoot (I can't imagine how difficult it was to find rocks that wouldn't stab or pinch their feet), and Mom wouldn't even use a pole for stability (Pat did have one pole).
I generally would cross first and "scout" the crossings (to the extent you could really "scout" them - the water was pretty deep and moving fast enough that you couldn't really see the bottom, so I did a lot of probing with my trekking poles), but my scouting wasn't super helpful since I didn't have the barefoot experience. We all ended up just picking our own ways across, and sometimes I'd go back to the middle and lend a hand or a pole to help the two of them across.
Most of these crossings were bridged at some point in the past, but the bridges would always wash out in high water events. Eventually, it was just too much trouble to replace the bridges, so now they're all unbridged (except for 3). However, in some places there are "side trails" going to the area where the bridge used to be, while the trail itself continues on to a different part of the stream where the "horse ford" is (and also the "people ford" now that there's not a bridge). At one point, we passed a branch-off to an old bridge location and continued to the ford location, and there was a ton of that thick, black, quicksand-looking mud you often see near rivers. I couldn't get to the water without walking through it, so I gingerly took a step around the outside of the muddy area...and promptly sank knee-deep in that disgusting stuff. I was scrambling to get out of it and into the water to wash myself off, and I ended up falling down (thankfully, on the bank and not all the way in the mud). When I finally got in the water, I couldn't see where the trail went on the other side. So I grabbed my Garmin to check our position and found that we should've actually taken the branch-off to the old bridge location, as the trail went straight across from there. I told Mom and Pat to go back that way, but instead of fighting back through the mud pit, I decided just to walk up the stream and meet them there. It was probably 100 yards upstream, and I was so over the damn water by the time I got there.
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| This was not the crossing where I walked upstream; this is just a random crossing that I took a picture of. |
Finally, finally, we made it back to the trailhead and to a bridged (with a very nice bridge, I might add) crossing that took us back to my car on Cataloochee Road.
I don't think Mom and Pat have ever been so happy to see a car, and it's been a long time since I've been so happy to see my car at the end of a hike. We were relatively unscathed, other than (1) Mom cut her hand on a log when she stumbled on a crossing (only the second or third time my first aid kit has been deployed); (2) I scraped my arm when I fell trying to cross the mud pit (didn't even know it until the next morning when I propped it on the bar in the kitchen and my raw skin stuck to the bar when I pulled it away); and (3) the general muscle soreness that comes from a hike like this. Pat is currently composing a song entitled, "We made it back to the car." Pretty sure it'll be a number one hit in the hiking community. We were all pretty hungry and ravaged the Cosby/Newport McDonald's on our way home. Most importantly, we lived to see another day and have a grand adventure to be proud of because we're strong women and we can do hard things!
Unduplicated Smokies miles: 248.25
Total Smokies miles: 310.1
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